Perl now provides a way to build perl without
"." in @INC by
default. If you want this feature, you can build with
-Ddefault_inc_excludes_dot

Because the testing / make process for perl modules do not
function well with "." missing from
@INC, Perl now supports the environment variable
PERL_USE_UNSAFE_INC=1 which makes Perl behave as it previously did,
returning "." to
@INC in all child processes.

WARNING: PERL_USE_UNSAFE_INC has been provided during the perl
5.25 development cycle and is not guaranteed to function in perl 5.26.

This install warning is more or less obsolete, since most
platforms already *will* have a /usr/bin/perl or similar provided by the
OS.

Reduce verbosity of "make install.man"

Previously, two progress messages were emitted for each
manpage: one by installman itself, and one by the function in
install_lib.pl that it calls to actually install the file. Disabling the
second of those in each case saves over 750 lines of unhelpful
output.

Several tests have been updated to work (or be skipped) on EBCDIC
platforms.

HP-UX

Net::Ping UDP test is skipped on HP-UX.

VMS

Move _pDEPTH and _aDEPTH after config.h otherwise DEBUGGING may not be
defined yet.

VAXC has not been a possibility for a good long while, and the
versions of the DEC/Compaq/HP/VSI C compiler that report themselves as
"DEC" in a listing file are 15 years or more out-of-date and
can be safely desupported.

An unclosed "\N{" could give
the wrong error message "\N{NAME} must be resolved
by the lexer".

List assignment in list context where the LHS contained aggregates and
where there were not enough RHS elements, used to skip scalar lvalues.
Previously, "(($a,$b,@c,$d) = (1))" in
list context returned "($a)"; now it
returns "($a,$b,$d)".
"(($a,$b,$c) = (1))" is unchanged: it
still returns "($a,$b,$c)". This can be
seen in the following:

sub inc { $_++ for @_ }
inc(($a,$b,@c,$d) = (10))

Formerly, the values of
"($a,$b,$d)" would be left as
"(11,undef,undef)"; now they are
"(11,1,1)".

[perl 129903]

The basic problem is that code like this: /(?{ s!!! })/ can
trigger infinite recursion on the C stack (not the normal perl stack)
when the last successful pattern in scope is itself. Since the C stack
overflows this manifests as an untrappable error/segfault, which then
kills perl.

We avoid the segfault by simply forbidding the use of the
empty pattern when it would resolve to the currently executing
pattern.

[perl 128997] Avoid reading beyond the end of the line buffer when there's
a short UTF-8 character at the end.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is
automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does
not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the
CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny
but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of
"perl -V", will be sent off to
perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make
it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then see
"SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for
details of how to report the issue.